Is a vegetable garden essential? Toronto gardens as culinary infrastructure

ABSTRACT

A recurring debate in cities and in the literature is whether gardening food to eat is essential or recreational. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, some political jurisdictions closed gardens, deeming them non-essential to life – including the province of Ontario where fieldwork for this study was conducted. This paper analyzes mixed methods data generated pre-pandemic to understand the role of urban agriculture in the lives of gardeners in Toronto, Canada. When people produce food for the home, is their activity recreational or an essential source of food? We employ a social-ecological lens and find that gardening supported health and wellbeing and provided participants with an important food source, oftentimes culturally significant. Qualitative and quantitative data describes the rich experiences of gardener participants in the diverse city. We argue that gardens are essential and seeing them as part of culinary infrastructure makes space for nonmarket food production in food systems analyses. Viewing gardens as essential should prompt policy decisions, particularly during crises, which support social-ecological, nonmarket food sources as important parts of culinary infrastructure.

KEYWORDS:

• Culinary infrastructure
• gardens
• urban agriculture
• food security
• mental health

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Also thank you to Shireen Arghandeh who worked on statistical analysis of these data and to Dr. Jayeeta Sharma for her support for the second stage of analysis through the Feeding City Lab at the University of Toronto Scarborough. A sincere thank you to the gardeners who shared their stories and shed light on this important part of urban life.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded bya SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Elton

Sarah Elton is a food systems researcher who works at the intersection of health, ecosystems and food in the city. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) and is also appointed to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. She is the director of the Food Health Ecosystems Lab. Her scholarly research has been published in the journals Gastronomica, Canadian Food Studies, Social Science and Medicine, Critical Public Health, Canadian Journal of Public Health and Environmental Humanities. Her two award-winning books, Locavore: From Farmers’ Fields to Rooftop Gardens, How Canadians are Changing the Way We Eat and Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet were Canadian bestsellers.

Donald Cole

Donald Cole is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, with a specialty certification in Public Health & Preventive Medicine (1992). He has led/collaborated on multiple research, policy and training grants and contracts from municipal to international funding organizations, with an emphasis on multi-stakeholder action research processes. He has supervised or co-supervised numerous graduate trainees, using exploratory, observational and intervention designs and a variety of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. He has coauthored over 40 book chapters and 275 peer-reviewed publications. His forty years of practice include: primary care at multiple community health centers; environmental-occupational consultation services; global health with colleagues in Latin America and Africa; and public health with colleagues from all levels of government, both in Canada and internationally. He currently practices rurally with a particular interest in ecological agriculture and alternative food networks. He remains a professor emeritus of the University of Toronto.